Our Travels to The Birchwood Fiber Festival

This post is a summary of our trip to The Birchwood Fiber Festival in Tennessee!

The Birchwood Fiber Festival is in, you guessed it, Birchwood Tennessee. Birchwood is a quiet little town with lots of fiber friends, located about 45 minutes north of Chattanooga. The festival was on May 3rd and 4th 2025, a Saturday and a Sunday. This was their 3rd year doing the festival, and they are hopping to continue to build it up and support the fiber community in the area.

This trip was quite a stretch for me. If you’ve been following along you know that I gave up doing mobile events to open a regular brick and mortar yarn shop. While I loved doing all the different events, meeting all the different people, and traveling around, it is so much work! From the borrowing my mom’s minivan, to packing, loading, driving, unpacking, setting up, doing the show, breaking down, and hauling all the stuff back again. I was doing an event almost every weekend back then, and it just got to be too much. I had committed to this event prior to opening my shop and I didn’t want to cancel on them.

However we had another road block, which was you need LOTS of inventory to fill a 10 x 20 booth. Opening a brick and mortar is very expensive. Let’s just say that I chose to open the shop instead of putting a down payment on a house, you get the idea. I couldn’t afford to purchase a ton of additional inventory for this show, so I reached out to the FL yarn dyers that I have accounts with. Several of them were happy to contribute towards the inventory and invoice me for what sold at the show afterwards. If they hadn’t been willing to help, we would not have been able to go to the festival. They helped so much, I had somewhere between 1,000 -1,200 skeins of yarn! Several of them also sent a few sample projects using their different yarns. It is always nice to see examples of things made with the yarn so people can envision what a finished project looks and feels like.

The dyers who contributed were: Bad Sheep Yarn, Beach Bunny Yarns, The Copper Corgi Fiber Studio, Dizzy Blonde Studios, Indigo Child Dye Art Studios, and Southern Skeins. Thank you all so so so much! You guys really made it happen! I also took the other FL dyed yarn that I already had in the shop, along with some other FL made merchandise like, notions, yarn bowls, and project bags.

The idea was “FL dyers go on the road”, which was a really big hit in Tennessee! Most of them couldn’t believe that we drove all the way up there. The crazier thing was we actually met someone who had lived in Tavares before! Totally nuts!

I knew I was going to need some help so I brought my sister, Sarah, along for the ride. We rented a big Ram cargo van and hit the road! We left at about 11:30am on Thursday morning and it was supposed to be about a 9-hour drive. With stops it ended up being 11 hours. We wanted to go up an extra day ahead of time so that we had time on Friday to complete the set up. We didn’t want to feel rushed, nor did we want to leave the house at midnight Friday morning, drive for hours, and then spend 5 hours setting up. It did indeed take 5 hours to complete the set up. This was a 10 x 20 booth, double the size of my original mobile shop!

The show took place at the Birchwood Community Center, which was originally a school. All the vendors were set up in a large, well lit, gymnasium, which was good considering it rained all day Saturday. Down one hallway was the cafeteria, and past that all of the classes and workshops were taking place in old classrooms. They were offering 16 different workshops throughout the weekend. Some included were up-cycling sweaters, beginner amigurumi, card weaving, making dorset buttons, and many more! Since we were vendors we didn’t have the opportunity to take any classes, but they looked like so much fun!

The cafeteria was set up to serve breakfast and lunch on both days of the event, thank goodness! We had breakfast at our hotel each morning, but I wasn’t sure how we were going to figure out lunch during the show. I was expecting to have to have food delivered, or send Sarah out to get some. Thankfully we didn’t have to worry about that. The meals were simple, and super reasonably priced. The cost of the food helped to support the community center. On Sunday Sarah and I both had loaded backed potatoes and they were no joke! They were delicious!

We got the chance to wander around and meet some of the other vendors. The Bede Sisters had some of her lovely hand dyed yarn. She and her husband were such lovely people! I have my eye on some of her tweed yarn. I don’t carry anything like it so I will be opening an account with her soon so that we can carry her amazing tweed yarn here. She even gave me a skein so I can work up a sample!

Bunny with Knitantics sells silk yarn exclusively. She said she gets her yarn from a small family business in India. Her silks were very unique and unlike other silks I have seen so far. I do carry some FL dyed silks from Copper Corgi and Beach Bunny and I love theirs. Love me a good silk yarn. I liked Knitantics too because they have some yarns that are totally different than what I already carry so I will be opening an account with her as well! Also she is a riot, she was so much fun to talk with!

We saw some other really incredible things like the biggest spinning wheel I’ve ever seen (which happened to be 300-something years old!), the cutest little felted critters, handmade project bags, woven baskets, art made from wool, so many amazing things! Below are some photos of a few of the other booths. I tried to add website links as I could, click on the pictures for the links to these amazing artisans!

The festival wrapped up at 4pm on Sunday and the race was on to pack everything up! Breaking down is much easier than setting up, so we were done in about an hour and fifteen minutes thanks to some additional hands who were done with their booths already. I am still sorting through the aftermath though! Most of the yarn I brought from the shop has made it back there by now, but there’s still yarn at the house that need to be counted up and returned to the different dyers, and all my display stuff needs to be put away. I will not be showing you a picture of what my living room looks like! ^insert embarrassed face here^

It took about 12 hours to drive home so we got home at 4am Monday morning, but it’s okay! Both Sarah and I took Monday off from our day jobs so we could recoup. We were able to stop at our favorite BBQ place of all time, Sugar’s Ribs, in Chattanooga on the way home. They call it “Q with a view” for good reason! Sugar’s is nestled right off the highway and sits high enough that you can overlook much of the valley while you eat. Normally we like to sit out on the patio, but the rain had made it too cold outside for us Floridians! So enjoy a photo of the patio and the view from our cozy table inside the restaurant. We got a brisket plate to share with a couple extra sides. Yum!

My goal/plan going into this show was to reinvest all the money from the sales, disregarding the cost of travel and hotel. I wasn’t sure how big the show would be, or how much yarn we would sell, but I knew that I wanted to thank the dyers for being so kind to me. We sold enough yarn to cover the travel expenses plus a little extra. Rather than putting the travel costs back into my bank account, I am reinvesting it in more product instead. I’m able to purchase some of the leftover yarn and notions from the dyers in addition to paying them for their yarn that sold. So with that being said, we have lots of new fun things in the shop!

I don’t plan on doing any more fiber festivals now that I have a shop, but who knows? The Birchwood Fiber Festival was an absolute blast! I love meeting new yarn people and chatting with them, discovering their favorite yarns and projects. I do not consider myself a “people person”, but man do I love yarn people! Yarn people are seriously some of the best people. Comment below to tell share your experience at the Birchwood Fiber Festival, your favorite fiber event, or your favorite memory with yarn people!